“We liked SnapLogic’s value model, which delivers the right blend of buy-and-own and pay-as-you-go. This was especially appealing to us when compared with a large up-front financial outlay, or the potential of swiftly running up a large bill required by other applications.”

—Steven Mandelbaum, Managing Director The Advisory Board Company

Challenge

As a trusted partner to more than 2,800 member organizations, The Advisory Board Company is the leading provider of comprehensive performance improvement services for health care and educational institutions. Its services include operational best practices and insights, business intelligence and analytic tools, management training, unbiased technology evaluation, and consulting support. Member organizations are free to select from a diverse collection of membership programs and options, including Strategy and operations research, Clinical research, Leadership development , Business intelligence and analytics , Physician performance and International offerings.

In keeping with this dedication to ongoing enhancement, the IT team at The Advisory Board Company launched a series of initiatives to leverage the added flexibility, functionality and faster deployments furnished by cloud-based application software. To further optimize business processes, the new cloud-based solutions will work in tandem with traditional, on-premise technology infrastructure. For the initial deployment, The Advisory Board Company is migrating from Microsoft CRM

to a heavily customized salesforce.com implementation that will be used to manage member services. At the same time, an internally hosted instance of Microsoft SQL Server will continue to serve as a data warehouse and reporting platform.

However, synchronizing data among divergent applications consumes substantial amounts of time and resources. With information spread among more than two million records, and several salesforce.com objects— some projected to contain over 500,000 records—The Advisory Board Company’s IT team was concerned that the current integration software would be too costly to consider and unable to meet data orchestration needs. In particular, the team discovered that SQL Server Integration Studio wasn’t able to gracefully work with cloud-based solutions such as salesforce.com. At the same time, salesforce.com’s data loader would not suffice for a large enterprise with a massive amount of rich, intricate information. The company needed a more efficient way to move its massive enterprise database to the cloud.

SnapLogic Makes Migration from On-Premise CRM Software to the salesforce.com a Snap

CuStOMeR CaSe Study

OrganizaTiOn

The Advisory Board Company

inTegraTiOnS

On-premise CRM software and salesforce.com

ChaLLenge

The Advisory Board Company’s IT team needed to move a sizable volume of data from its on-premise CRM application to salesforce.com. The team needed an efficient, cost-effective way of creating an integration pipeline between the two applications.

SOLuTiOn

The team deployed SnapLogic Server and the salesforce.com snap to create a seamless connection between the on-premise and cloud-based applications.

SnapS uSed

salesforce.com

reSuLTS

• Reduced costs through use of pay-as-you-go pricing model.

• Provided access to vendor-agnostic tools, resulting in improved productivity.

• Delivered scalable solution to accommodate a growing database of enterprise-class customers.

• Reduced risk and sped time to cloud integration.

• Enabled rapid introduction of cloud-based services for multiple applications.

Solution

SnapLogic’s revolutionary Snap Store, through which dozens of third-party partners and developers offer affordable, certified integration plug-ins or “Snaps,” enabled The Advisory Board to complete the migration. SnapLogic’s Snaps replace hard-coded or hand-coded integrations and enable developers to assemble data integration flows using a drag-and-drop interface. SnapLogic offers a core library of pre-developed Snaps and components with the SnapLogic Server, plus an expanding variety of Snaps that are available online in the SnapStore.

“We liked SnapLogic’s value model, which delivers the right blend of buy-and-own and pay-as-you-go,” said Steven Mandelbaum, managing director of The Advisory Board Company. “This was especially appealing to us when compared with a large up-front financial outlay, or the potential of swiftly running up a large bill required by other applications.”

Behind the Snap Store is the SnapLogic Server, the foundation and central hub for connecting any combination of SaaS, Cloud and On-premise applications and data sources. SnapLogic Server goes beyond traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities by offering discoverable, callable, and reusable data services. Its REST-based engine works like a Web server, so the engine reads, transforms and writes data in a Web format.

snaplogic.com | store.snaplogic.com | +1 650.525.3500 | 71 East Third Avenue, Second Floor, San Mateo, CA 94401

© 2011 SnapLogic, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms and conditions, pricing, and other information subject to change without notice. ”SnapLogic” and “SnapStore” are among the trademarks of SnapLogic, Inc. All other product and company names and marks mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only. “SnapLogic” is registered in the U.S. and Trademark Office.

CS-ABC.Ver03/092011

SnapLogic Server comes with dozens of free components and Snaps for database connectivity, business productivity, BI, analytics, business data, social media and more. Rather than mandating a closed environment and proprietary messaging structures, SnapLogic uses the same widely adopted communication techniques and open protocols as the globally scalable World Wide Web, delivering a fast, more modular way to interoperate with existing applications and data sources.

SnapLogic Designer offers an intuitive yet powerful development environment that simplifies the previously daunting process of building, testing and deploying a data integration pipeline to connect on-premise and cloud-based applications. The Advisory Board Company’s IT team was able to quickly leverage its familiar drag-and-drop approach to load Microsoft CRM information into the SQL Server data warehouse. Once these records arrived in the data warehouse, they were able to quickly populate salesforce.com with this information.

As Salesforce.com becomes an integral part of The Advisory Board Company’s application portfolio, SnapLogic Server will continue to retrieve data from the cloud and place it into the data warehouse, making it readily available to create operational reports and analyze business intelligence processes.

Results

According to Mandelbaum, SnapLogic is ideal for supporting for the mixed environments of on-premise and cloud solutions found in the majority of IT organizations. It offers The Advisory Board Company’s IT team vendor-agnostic, easy-to-use tools that increase productivity yet is able to scale and meet the needs of even the largest companies.

“The SnapStore is a visionary method for designing and distributing enterprise integration software that is far superior to the more traditional monolithic approach followed by proprietary, closed vendors,” he said. Additionally, SnapLogic’s affordable pricing and deployment models reduce risk and make it straightforward to get started rapidly.”

As cloud-based applications continue to gain new adherents, large amounts of information will always remain on-premise. Tying all of this data together will remain one of IT’s most essential responsibilities. Leveraging SnapLogic’s solution, The Advisory Board Company will be able to quickly and efficiently add cloud-based solutions for marketing automation, financial and travel/expense applications.

“Our users expect us to identify and deploy cloud-based applications quickly, and then tie these solutions together efficiently,” said Mandelbaum. “SnapLogic will be at the heart of our integration strategy to keep all of these exciting new applications working together to provide maximum business value.”

With SnapLogic, integration is a “Snap.”